Remembering the 24th: Putting Black Soldiers in Missoula in Context
Understanding the Importance of Black Soldiers in Missoula in the Early 20th Century
On the morning of May 30, 1903, a procession of living Civil War memory in Missoula marched from city hall to the Northern Pacific Depot Station. Members of the Grand Army of the Republic (G.A.R., a Union veterans organization) and the Women’s Relief Corp (a women’s auxiliary to the G.A.R.) walked with Confederate veterans in solemn order where they were to be taken by train to the Missoula Cemetery for a Memorial Day commemoration.
Escorting the assembly was a firing squad from the 24th Infantry — the all-Black Army regiment stationed in Montana at the time and a living embodiment of the revolutionary, liberating outcome of the conflict that wreaked so much death and destruction not 40 years prior.
The war still cast a long shadow on Memorial Day festivities in those days — the holiday’s inception came from the Civil War, after all, and there were still many living veterans residing all across the country. Missoula was no different. The G.A.R. was at the center of the day’s events, performing their observance ritual before those assembled at the cemetery adorned all the graves with flowers.
Later that day, Missoulians poured into the Union Opera House for an afternoon memorial program. At least some 24th Infantry soldiers were in attendance as the battalion’s bugler played “Taps” at the end of the ceremony.
The featured speaker of the day was attorney Harry Parsons whose speech was entirely devoted to Civil War memory. For his part, he did put slavery front and center as the cause of the war — something many historians were working very hard to obscure at the time. Parsons gave a long history lesson on the subject that covered matters not found in many high school curriculums today from filibusters in Cuba to the Wilmot Proviso.
“…(H)e also spoke of the aristocracy of the South builded (sic)on the system of Slavery; and pointed out that the South sought to establish and nationalize slavery, and to maintain the doctrine of state supremacy,” the Missoulian accounted on June 2, 1903.
Yet, at the same time, Parsons embraced the ongoing efforts re-centering Memorial Day as a time for “healing” between Northern and Southern Whites. Such focus on sectional reconciliation had dominated White Americans’ efforts to highlight the War’s outcome primarily as one that preserved the union while diminishing the other, liberatory result of the bloody conflict: the destruction of the institution of slavery and the increasingly fraught effort to incorporate full citizenship rights and status to the 4 million Black Americans emancipated by the war.
“He contended that by precept, teaching and idea the Southern veterans were as sincere as the North; that it was not a war of conquest or ravages but ideas in which father, brother and son took opposite sides.”
The country’s concerted effort to reframe the nature of the conflict to an abstract idea of “state’s rights” while focusing on White reconciliation had a profoundly devastating impact on the trajectory of Reconstruction. By 1903, the promising and lofty goals of racial equality at the foundation of Radical Reconstruction had failed dramatically. Historian David W Blight in his penetrating examination of Civil War memory, Race and Reunion, observed the tragedy of the process:
“The sectional reunion after so horrible a Civil War was a political triumph by the late 19th Century but it could not have been achieved without the re-subjugation of many of those people whom the war had freed from centuries of bondage.”¹
This was evident in Harry Parsons’ speech. Like the entire day’s events as a whole, he gave no special recognition to the roughly 250 Black soldiers stationed at Fort Missoula at the time or acknowledged how their predecessors (the 54th Massachusetts volunteers, for example, and the many US Colored Troop regiments during the Civil War) were instrumental in destroying the Confederacy. It’s astounding, in a sense, that while Missoulians were solemnizing the dead of the war, the town was being “protected” by those whose status had been at the very center of the conflict. That deeply significant fact, however, went completely unacknowledged by the event’s organizers and press coverage of the day. If ever there was an opportunity to memorialize and celebrate the liberating outcome of the war in early 20th Century Missoula, this was it.
But to Harry Parsons, Memorial Day was an opportunity to wear racial blinders and sugarcoat the issues that the war had “decided.”
“He…spoke of the result (of the war) of all men being equal in the eye of the law, thus carrying out the idea of the framers of the constitution.”
If private Eugenius S.A. Wynne of company K had been in attendance for the speech, he probably rolled his eyes at that assessment. Just a month later, Wynne would pen one of two blistering indictments in the Missoulian at the notion of “all men being equal in the eye of the law.” A former schoolteacher from Georgia, Wynne knew all too well the lie of that conclusion.
Printed on June 30th, 1903, Wynne posed questions to the Missoulian’s nearly all-White readership:
I would like very much for you to ask your reading public the following questions through the columns of your paper:
Are there any Christians in the true sense of the word, among the American whites of the present day?
What is the true meaning of ‘All men being made after God’s own image?’
What is meant by ‘God our Father, Christ our Redeemer, man our brother?’
What is the true brotherhood of man?
Why can’t these questions be applied to the negro as well as to other people?
Why can’t the negro be let alone? Why do our white brothers continue to disregard both the laws of God and this, our beloved country, in his blind hatred of his brother in black?
These are questions that continue to agitate me. Why are they true?
Hatred on the part of our white brother for his brother in black in all walks of life is fast making this, our beloved America, the proclaimed land of the brave and home of the free, an impossible home for the negro.
O! Why can’t they see that this long suffering people are beginning to tire and grow uneasy?
…
Something must be done to help this weary people — freed and yet slaves. We have hoped, trusted and prayed; we have even supplicated and begged. But the time for these things has passed.
We will continue to hope, trust and pray, but we will no longer beg.
The scenes described above of Memorial Day in 1903 and Wynne’s searing letter both speak to the significance of the 24th Infantry’s time in Missoula. A town still very much in the process of being formed in a newly colonized region of the country was in a position to address the questions of race, citizenship and belonging that could, potentially, distinguish it from the violent White supremacy of the South and the dismissive racism of the North.
There’s a tension in Harry Parsons speech that demonstrates the contingency of the moment in Missoula history. In recognizing the centrality of slavery as the cause of the Civil War, the speech held a promise that the barbarity done to its own citizens was not forgotten. But, at the same time, his blind conclusion that basic issues of equality before the law had been settled, despite all the evidence to the contrary, suggested he didn’t truly see the importance of the work that still needed to be done.
Wynne’s letter conveys its own mixed messages. On the one hand, the fact that the Missoulian gave him the space to air views that could very well get him killed in the South showed that the region’s violent White supremacy was not being directly replicated in Missoula. Yet the very fact that Wynne’s letter stands out as singularly unique in its clear-eyed condemnation suggests that White sentiment in Missoula regarding these fundamental issues was indifferent at best.
It’s vital to absorb the context of the times when understanding the significance of a sizable early Black population living in Missoula. Both the 25th Infantry and 24th Infantry represented the first substantial Black migration to the region. Just five years after the 24th Infantry left town, Missoula County would post a record number of Black residents living in the area in the 1910 Census. More than 30% of that population were retired Buffalo Soldiers and their families.
What’s more, the soldiers also attracted businesses operated by Black citizens like laundry workers but also saloons and other forms of entertainment for the men who were less likely to be welcomed at similar venues run by White owners. There were several “resorts adjoining the county road between Missoula and Buckhouse Bridge” near the fort that catered to off-duty Buffalo Soldiers which were run and employed by Black residents. In that regard, the soldiers’ presence helped put Missoula on a map as a place out West with a known Black population that other Black people looking to move West could go.
Understanding the Times
To get a sense of the importance of this Black population living in Missoula in the early 20th Century, examining the racial conditions of the nation as a whole at the time is vital.
Between 1900 and the end of 1903, at least 380 Black people were lynched across the country. It’s difficult to overstate the impact of this as most were highly-visible, planned public spectacles providing horrifying scenes that sent an unmistakably intimidating signal to Black people in the South and the nation as a whole. White Southerners could do this with impunity as public mob executions were almost never prosecuted in the region.
In August of 1903, a highly-publicized annual Chautaqua (a convention of speakers covering a variety of social and political issues) in New York dedicated their gathering to the subject of “mob rule” and lynching. Georgia newspaper editor John Temple Graves made headlines as the opening speaker by publicly and proudly condoning the ritualized brutality. Evoking White southern fears of interracial sex, Graves said lynching was necessary to prevent “the crime which provokes it. And will never be discontinued until that crime is eliminated.”
How shall we destroy the crime which always has and always will provoke lynching? The mob answers it with the rope, the bullet, and, sometimes, God save! with the torch! And the mob is the sternest, the strongest and the most effective restraint that the age holds for the control of rape. The lyncher does not exterminate the rapist, but he holds him mightily in check. The masses of the negro…are not afraid of death coming in a regular way. They love display and the spectacular element of a trial and execution appeal to their imaginations.
White southerners had successfully convinced much of the country that the threat of Black rape toward White women was a pervasive problem. The reality was that a lynching would occur with the slightest pretext of perceived transgression and was a means of asserting a rigidly violent racial caste system.
“(T)he definition of ‘rape’ in the South was incredibly broad and required no allegation of force because white institutions, laws, and most white people rejected the idea that a white woman could or would willingly consent to sex with an African American man,” according to a report on lynching by the Equal Justice Initiative published in 2017.
Just a few weeks before the convention on lynching in New York, the racist firebrand senator Ben “Pitchfork” Tillman engaged in a series of debates with Kansas Senator John Burton. While repeatedly calling for the repeal of the 15th Amendment giving Black Americans the right to vote, Tillman said “(I)f (a Black man) ever looks (a White man) in the face in the South and aspires to govern him or be his social equal he will be met with the shotgun and the bayonet.”
Tennessee Senator Edward Carmack also proposed repealing the 15th Amendment that year. The openly racist Carmack said he believed the measure had strong support in congress.
During his tenure as editor of the Memphis Commercial in the 1890s, Carmack incited a mob to destroy intrepid journalist Ida B Wells’ newspaper, the Memphis Free Speech and Headlight, after she exposed the lies undergirding the rationale behind Southern mob rule and lynching.
Also in the summer of 1903, the warden overseeing Georgia’s state convict leasing program for women, Wayne Allagood, brutally whipped a White convict, Mamie De Crist. De Crist claimed Allagood whipped her after she refused his sexual advances. Papers around the country carried the story and a full investigation was launched leading to Allagood’s resignation. The case spoke to the hypocrisy of the region’s concern for protecting “white womanhood” as well as to its lack of concern for the scores of Black women in Georgia’s penal system. From the end of the Civil War to 1908, Black women accounted for 98% of all female convicts in the state of Georgia² who surely experienced far more brutality on an ongoing basis. Their stories were not told, however.
All of these racial issues swirling across the nation were on the mind of Eugenius Wynne when he penned a second, longer and more forceful rebuke of anti-Black racism across the country published by the Missoulian on September 1, 1903.
“In Alabama the negro has again become a chattel and Georgia, as well — in no Southern state is he a citizen,” Wynne wrote. “He is taxed without being allowed to say how the taxes wrung from him are to be used. He is under the penalties of the law while without the pale of its protection. He is forced to submit to outrages of the rabble without the power of public opinion to defend him.”
In his 1,000-word letter, Wynne described mob rule in the South as an inherently political act driven by the machine of single-party rule intent on keeping Black people in a perpetual state of subjugation.
The mob simply means a suspension of law. It means that the homes and the lives of the black are placed absolutely at the mercy of the lawless. Courts of justice in the South have seldom stood between the black man and his white oppressor. The old maxim of the law, that a man is considered innocent until he is proven guilty, is actually reversed in the courts of the South when a negro is accused of any crime. Look at the prison pens of the South today. Look at the thousands of negroes serving long terms for offenses that no white man will ever be condemned to prison for. Siberia may be a black spot upon the earth’s surface, but the prison pens of the South — behind their frowning walls cover crimes as black and as hellish as are written around the mines of Siberia. The negro shuns the courts of the South because he knows from them he is likely to be practically returned to bondage.
Wynne gave Missoulians an unshakably clear-eyed view that served as a potent counterweight to the white lens that nearly all racial reporting in the paper offered at the time.
(W)hen these men get up before intelligent audiences as Tillman does habitually, and as John Temple Graves did yesterday, and says the mob stands between the chastity of the white woman and her black assailant…it is savagely grotesque when we read of how the chivalrous Allagood of Georgia assailed the chastity of a poor defenseless white woman, and cruelly and brutally whipped her because she rejected his proffered embrace. Has Southern chivalry descended to this? Has mob rule brought the fair name of the South so low that no one rises up in the halls of the nation to defend the South, but Ben Tillman, Ed Carmack and John Temple Graves? In the names of the great men of the past, the giants who lived when elections meant the voice of the people and not the rabble of the machine, as a Southern Negro man, I protest.
Wynne’s letter is both a vivid account of the national context of the times when the 24th Infantry was stationed at Fort Missoula and an example of the needed perspective a Black population could provide a burgeoning Western town still very much in the process of being formed. His letter stands out as much from its uniquely authoritative perspective as from the forcefulness of his words.
If Missoula, as a growing Western city, were to represent something fundamentally different to the daily violations of citizenship rights occurring in the South, the presence of these soldiers and their experiences in town, needs careful attention.
It is important to understand how strongly tied to Missoula’s early community soldiers like Wynne were. At a time when Black migration to the West was but a trickle, their sizable presence and close connection to community life by 1905 represented the seed of potential for Missoula to be a welcoming place for Black people to lay down roots and build a community. And while there wasn’t anything unusual about Fort Missoula soldiers playing a visible role in the community, the relevance lies in the racial context of the nation and in the early development of Missoula.
Prior to the 10 years that the 25th Infantry were stationed at Fort Missoula from 1888–1898, the county’s Black population was almost nonexistent. The 1880 Census for Missoula County (a much larger area than it is now encompassing present-day Sanders, Lake, and Flathead counties) listed just four Black residents.³
In 1890, however, there were 314 Black people living in the county — roughly 2% of the population.⁴ As dramatic as that may sound, Fort Missoula is the primary reason for the growth. About 2/3s of that population were 25th Infantry soldiers temporarily stationed in the county.⁵ By 1900, after the 25th Infantry left for Cuba to fight in the Spanish-American War, Missoula County’s Black population fell to just 54⁶, making up less than half a percent of the population.
When the entire third battalion of the 24th Infantry filled the barracks of Fort Missoula in August of 1902, 320 Black soldiers⁷ became part of the town’s community — a growth of about 6 times the 1900 census numbers. While the rolls of enlisted soldiers would soon be cut by about a third later in the year, the influx of Black soldiers in town still represented a dramatic rise.
Much had changed in the United States since 1888 when the 25th had first arrived at the fort. The violence of US settler colonialism had subdued the “frontier,” driving indigenous tribes onto reservations. Missoula County reflected that trend as it saw the Bitterroot Salish forced to relocate to the Flathead Reservation while the county’s mostly white population grew from about 2,500 people in 1880 to roughly 14,000 by 1900.⁸
With the advent of the Spanish-American War in 1898, the United States military’s interest shifted from solidifying settler-colonialism at home to expanding into the new frontiers of American imperialism overseas. Most of the 24th Infantry’s 3rd battalion at Fort Missoula came from an ugly and deeply controversial war in the Philippines that quickly took the noble sheen off of America’s image as liberators. A conflict that persisted far longer than the war in Cuba, the Philippine rebellion was still going on when the 24th were ordered back to the islands in 1905.
All the while, Black American life at home, as Wynne’s letter so poignantly described, grew increasingly fraught. The promise of full citizenship brought about by the Civil War and the enshrinement of the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments to the Constitution gave way to Southern “redemption:” serfdom as sharecroppers, Jim Crow laws, federal abandonment of legal citizenship protections, lynching, and an even more punishing form of slavery through convict-leasing laws.
At the same time, White Americans were fed an ongoing diet of demeaning racist caricatures of Black life through the rapid growth of minstrelsy as the country’s first form of endemic popular culture. Indeed, in Missoula County from 1902–1905 (the years the 24th were stationed at the fort), there were no fewer than 17 minstrel show performances — mostly put on for large crowds by well-known national traveling productions at the Union Opera House.
It’s this backdrop that one needs to keep in mind when considering the significance of the soldiers’ direct participation in community events and how they may have served, to some degree, to counteract the racist depictions and crude stereotypes so pervasive in American culture.
Less than 1% of all Black Americans at the beginning of the 20th Century lived in the West. The degree to which the region offered a welcoming alternative for Black folk was still very much an open question — a question that would be taken up as the century progressed and Black migration out of the South grew exponentially.
Moreover, many of the men from the 25th Infantry and this battalion from the 24th were Spanish-American War veterans, and were ready by the end of the decade to retire and find a place to live and build a family. Their experiences in Missoula would bring a lot to bear on that decision.
A look at the civic engagement of Black soldiers during these pivotal three years in early Missoula history therefore sheds some light on the direct experiences the community had with Black folk outside of what the crudely racist depictions of minstrel shows and national newspaper reporting produced. What follows in the next section is an accounting of those events and a glimpse into the direct experiences the greater community had with these soldiers participating in fairly routine and easily relatable civic exercises.
FOOTNOTES
¹David Blight, Race and Reunion, (Belknap Press, 2001) Prologue
²“The Foundational Lawlessness of the Law Itself,” Khalil Gibran Muhammad, Daedalus, Winter 2022, v. 151, p.111
³“Tenth Census of the United States: 1880” — Missoula County, Montana Territory, Dept. of Commerce and Labor — Bureau of the Census; Accessed via socialexplorer.com
⁴“Eleventh Census of the United States: 1890” — Missoula County, MT, Dept. of Commerce and Labor — Bureau of the Census; Accessed via socialexplorer.com
⁵U.S., Returns from Regular Army Infantry Regiments, 1821–1916, 25th Infantry accessed via ancestry.com & “Eleventh Census of the United States: 1890” — Missoula County, MT, Dept. of Commerce and Labor — Bureau of the Census; Accessed via socialexplorer.com
⁶“Twelfth Census of the United States: 1900” — Missoula County, MT, Dept. of Commerce and Labor — Bureau of the Census; Accessed via socialexplorer.com
⁷U.S., Returns from Regular Army Infantry Regiments, 1821–1916, 24th Infantry, Roll 251, Aug 1902
⁸“Tenth Census of the United States: 1880” & “Twelfth Census of the United States: 1900” Missoula County, MT, Dept. of Commerce and Labor — Bureau of the Census; Accessed via socialexplorer.com
